“Choubris!” he said, in a sort of loud whisper. He glanced around, as though afraid. “It is you! Thank God!”
“I already have, sir. And you might thank me, for such diligence in the looking.”
“Is there anybody with you?” the prince hissed.
“Only the aforesaid deity, sir, if the more insistent priests are to be believed.”
Ferbin looked most unkempt, and unslept, too. He glanced about the place again. “Nobody else?”
“An old though dependable rowel, sir. And for yourself—”
“Choubris! I am in the most terrible danger!”
Choubris scratched behind one ear. “Ah. With respect, sir, you might not be aware; we did win the battle.”
“I know that, Choubris! I’m not an idiot!”
Choubris frowned, but remained silent.
“You’re absolutely sure there’s nobody else about?”
Choubris looked back to the small door, then up at the sky. “Well, there are lots of people about, sir; half the Greater Army is tidying up or licking its wounds after our famous victory.” It was beginning to dawn on Choubris that he might have the ticklish job of telling the prince that his father was dead. This ought to mean, of course, that Ferbin was effectively king, but Choubris knew people could be funny regarding that whole good news/bad news business. “I am alone, sir,” he told Ferbin. “I don’t know what else to tell you. Perhaps you’d best get down from there.”
“Yes! I can’t stay here for ever.” The drop was easily jumpable, but Ferbin made to turn round and lower himself half way to the earthen floor of the folly. Choubris sighed and stood by the wall to help. “Choubris, have you anything to drink or eat?” Ferbin asked. “I’m parched and famished!”
“Wine, water, bread and saltmeat, sir,” Choubris said, forming a stirrup with his hands, back against the wall. “My saddle bags are like a travelling victualler’s.”
Ferbin lowered one boot to his servant’s hands, narrowly avoiding scarring him with his spur. “Wine? What sort?”
“Fortified, sir. Better so than this place.” Choubris took the prince’s weight in his cupped hands and grunted in pain as he lowered him.
“Are you all right?” Ferbin asked when he was on the ground. He looked frightened, grey with worry or shock or something or other. His clothes were filthy and his long fair hair all tangled and matted. Also, he smelled of smoke. Choubris had never seen him look so distressed. He was crouched, too; Choubris was used to looking up to his prince, but they were of a level now.
“No, sir, I’m not all right. I had a beast fall on me in the confusion yesterday.”
“Of course! Yes, I saw. Quick, let’s crouch down here.” Ferbin pulled Choubris to one side, by a tall bush. “No, wait; fetch me something to eat and drink. If you see anybody, don’t tell them I’m here!”
“Sir,” Choubris said, deciding to humour the fellow for now. Probably all he needed was something in his belly.
As the traitors and regicides set to burn the old building, having taken themselves and the bodies of the murdered outside, Ferbin had started looking for a way out.
He felt dazed, stunned, half dead himself. His vision seemed to have shrunk, or his eyes would not move properly in their orbits, because he seemed only able to see straight ahead. His ears appeared to think he was near a great waterfall or in a high tower in a storm, for he could hear a terrible roaring noise all about him that he knew was not really there, as if the WorldGod, even the World itself, was shrieking in horror at the foulness of what had been done in that awful ruin.
He’d waited for people loyal to the King to come rushing in when they heard the shots that killed the priest and the young medic, but nobody did. Others had appeared, but they seemed calm and unconcerned and merely helped move the bodies and bring some kindling and lampstone to start the fire. They were all traitors here, he thought; to reveal himself now would be to die like the others.
He’d crept away, sick and weak with the shock of it, barely able to stand. He climbed to the next highest floor by steps set against the building’s rear wall, as they lit the fires below. Smoke came up quickly, initially grey then turning black, filling the already shadowy spaces of the antique factory with still greater darkness and making him choke. At first most of the fumes made for the great hole in the gable wall, but then they thickened around him, stinging in his nose and throat. Had the sound of crackling and roaring below not been so loud, he’d have feared being heard outside as he hacked and coughed. He looked for windows on the side of the building where he’d crawled and climbed, but could see nothing.
He found more steps, leading him still further up, into what must be the building’s loft and felt along the wall with his fingers, coughing now with every breath, until he found what appeared to be a window. He pulled at a shutter, pushed at some already broken glass, and it gave. Smoke surged out around him. He stuck his head forward, gulping in cool clear air.
But he was too high up! Even if there was nobody on this side to see him, he’d never survive the fall uninjured. He looked out, dipping his head beneath the current of smoke and heat exiting around and above him. He expected to see a track or yard, four storeys below. Instead he stung himself on a rain-sticky brattle bush. He felt down and his hand closed on damp earth. In the vague red afterlight of a long-set sun, he saw that he was, incredibly, somehow back to ground level. The building was situated on a river bank so steep that one side was fully four floors high while the other, pressed against the valley’s steep side, was barely one.
He pulled himself out, still coughing, and crawled away across rain-wet, glutinously muddy ground to wait beneath some nearby bushes while the abandoned building burned.
“All due respect and such, sir, but have you gone mad?”
“Choubris, I swear on the WorldGod, on my dead father’s body, it’s just as I’ve said.”
Choubris Holse had noticed earlier, while his master was swallowing wine from the upended bottle and tearing off lumps of bread with his teeth — it seemed that take away the table and you took away the accompanying manners — that Prince Ferbin was unarmed while he, of course, still had his trusty short-knife on his belt, not to mention an army pistol issued a couple of days ago he seemed to have forgotten to return and which was tucked into his waistband by the small of his back. Not to mention — and he rarely did — a small but exceedingly sharp emergency knife reassuringly scabbarded down one boot. These facts had, he judged, just gone from being of barely passing interest to moderately important, given that it now appeared he was dealing with a bizarrely deluded madman.
Ferbin put the bottle down and let the end of the bread drop to his lap, setting his head back against the wall of the ruin, as though looking up through the foliage of the bush he’d insisted they hide beneath before he’d been prepared to break his fast. “Even you don’t believe me!” he cried, despairing. He put his head in his hands and wept.
Choubris was taken aback. He’d never seen the prince weep like this, not sober (everybody knew that to drink was to increase the hydrographical pressure within a body, thus expressing the relevant fluids from all available bodily orifices, so that didn’t count).
He ought to try to comfort him somehow. Perhaps he’d misunderstood. He’d try to get the matter clear.